Download or read book The Occasional Virgin written by Hanan al-Shaykh and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a sunny beach on the Italian Riviera, two thirtysomething women, Yvonne and Huda, relax by the sparkling sea. But despite the setting, as their vacation unfolds, their complicated pasts seep through to the idyllic present. Both women spent their childhoods in Lebanon—Yvonne raised in a Christian family, Huda in a Muslim one—and they now find themselves torn between the traditional worlds they were born into and the successful professional identities they’ve created. Three months later, when Huda (a theater director from Toronto) visits Yvonne (an advertising executive) in London, a chance encounter with a man at Speaker’s Corner leads to profound repercussions for them both, as each woman undertakes her own quest for romance, revenge, and fulfillment. Witty and wry, The Occasional Virgin is a poignant and perceptive story of the tumultuous lives and sometimes shocking choices of two women successful in their careers but unlucky in love.
Download or read book The Virgin s Guardian written by Fiona Davenport and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One night. One tiny lie. It all comes back to bite me in the ass when my mysterious stranger shows up as my new guardian.
Download or read book The Virgin Suicides written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
Download or read book Alone of All Her Sex written by Marina Warner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1983-03-12 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.
Download or read book Mr Wroe s Virgins written by Jane Rogers and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Prophet John Wroe was told by God to comfort himself with seven virgins, his congregation gave him their daughters. So begins this provocative and "immensely powerful" ("Booklist") novel, set in 19th-century England and based on actual events.
Download or read book The Virgins written by Pamela Erens and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s 1979, and Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are notorious at Auburn Academy. They’re an unlikely pair at an elite East Coast boarding school (she’s Jewish; he’s Korean American) and hardly shy when it comes to their sexuality. Aviva is a formerly bookish girl looking for liberation from an unhappy childhood; Seung is an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs and a covert rebel against his demanding immigrant parents. In the minds of their titillated classmates—particularly that of Bruce Bennett-Jones—the couple lives in a realm of pure, indulgent pleasure. But, as is often the case, their fabled relationship is more complicated than it seems: despite their lust and urgency, their virginity remains intact, and as they struggle to understand each other, the relationship spirals into disaster. The Virgins is the story of Aviva and Seung’s descent into confusion and shame, as re-imagined in richly detailed episodes by their classmate Bruce, a once-embittered voyeur turned repentant narrator. With unflinching honesty and breathtaking prose, Pamela Erens brings a fresh voice to the tradition of the great boarding school novel.
Download or read book The Fates Will Find Their Way written by Hannah Pittard and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A bold, wise, magical, and authentic novel about youthful infatuation and its legacy. Hannah Pittard’s beautifully confident prose is sure to make readers look back on their own teenage years with fresh wonder.” —Vendela Vida, author of The Lovers Already acclaimed for her short fiction—a McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award winner whose work was selected by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in 2008 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories—Hannah Pittard proves herself a master of long form fiction as well with her haunting, masterfully crafted debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way. A powerful and beautiful literary masterwork reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides, Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way tells the unforgettable story of a teenaged girl gone missing, and the boys she grew up with who find themselves caught in the mysterious wake of her absence for the rest of their lives.
Download or read book Seventy two Virgins written by Boris Johnson and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American President, on a State Visit to Britain is giving a major address to a top-level audience in Westminster Hall. Ferocious security is provided by a joint force of the United States Secret Service and Scotland Yard. Then a stolen ambulance runs into trouble with the Parking Authorities. A hapless Member of Parliament, having mislaid his crucial pass, is barred from Westminster, his bicycle regarded as a potential lethal weapon. And a man going by the name of Jones, although born in Karachi, successfully slips through the barriers, and whole new ball game starts
Download or read book THE GUARDIAN S VIRGIN WARD written by Caitlin Crews and published by Harlequin / SB Creative. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of her birthday, Liliana gave her virginity to Izar. She wanted her guardian, whom she had been in love with for ten years, to love her back for even a moment. But it was a huge mistake—Izar proposed to her, not out of love, but because of their night together. Liliana was then shipped away to Switzerland to be trained to become the “perfect wife.” An obedient, chaste and unloved wife… No matter how much she loves him, he never reciprocates…
Download or read book Mother of God written by Miri Rubin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping, ambitious study of the Virgin Mary’s emergence and role throughout Western historyHow did the Virgin Mary, about whom very little is said in the Gospels, become one of the most powerful and complex religious figures in the world? To arrive at the answers to this far-reaching question, one of our foremost medieval historians, Miri Rubin, investigates the ideas, practices, and images that have developed around the figure of Mary from the earliest decades of Christianity to around the year 1600. Drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of sources—including music, poetry, theology, art, scripture, and miracle tales—Rubin reveals how Mary became so embedded in our culture that it is impossible to conceive of Western history without her.In her rise to global prominence, Mary was continually remade and reimagined by wave after wave of devotees. Rubin shows how early Christians endowed Mary with a fine ancestry; why in early medieval Europe her roles as mother, bride, and companion came to the fore; and how the focus later shifted to her humanity and unparalleled purity. She also explores how indigenous people in Central America, Africa, and Asia remade Mary and so fit her into their own cultures.Beautifully written and finely illustrated, this book is a triumph of sympathy and intelligence. It demonstrates Mary’s endless capacity to inspire and her profound presence in Christian cultures and beyond.
Download or read book Middlesex written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy. But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion. Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.
Download or read book The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia written by Mary M. Talbot and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creative partnership of acclaimed writer and academic Mary M. Talbot and graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot has produced some of the most challenging and entertaining graphic novels in recent memory, including 2012's Costa Award medalist Dotter of Her Father's Eyes. The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia explores the life of revolutionary French feminist Louise Michel, a visionary teacher, poet, and radical who took up arms against a reactionary regime that executed thousands. Even deportation to a distant penal colony could not stop Michel from taking up the cause of the indigenous population against French colonial oppression.
Download or read book Virgin written by Radhika Sanghani and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I don't need the perfect guy. I don't need candlelight or roses. Honestly, I don't even need a real bed... Ellie Kolstakis is a twenty-one-year-old virgin. She's not religious. She's not waiting for marriage. She's not even holding on for The One. Ellie's just unlucky. But with her final year of university coming to an end, she's determined to shed her V-plates, once and for all. And she's ready to try anything - from submitting to her domineering Greek mother's matchmaking skills to embracing the world of nether-waxing trends (no-one wants a 'Hitler') and even YouTube tutorials on how to give a 'blow gift' (it should never be a job). After all, what has she got to lose? Well, besides the obvious.
Download or read book The House of Mirth written by Edith Wharton and published by McLeod & Allen. This book was released on 1905 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Small Pleasures written by Clare Chambers and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives…with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.
Download or read book The Disease of Virgins written by Helen King and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a compelling study of the origins and history of the disease. Following the continuity of the disease from its classical roots up, this study questions the nature of the disease and the relationship between illness and body image.
Download or read book Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins written by Carlos Fuentes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1990-04 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting new short fiction by the master Latin American writer, this assortment of tales includes stories of mannequin-swiping youths and a bullfighter at the time of Goya.
